University, as a teacher in the Department ofHumanities and Computing and more recently shewas responsible for the realisation of computer-aidedapplications for the Department of Art History.Furthermore she worked at the Netherlands HistoricData Archive and taught in the postgraduateprogramme on Historical Information Processingat Leiden University.Since October 1999 Kersen has been working asa consultant with the Dutch Digital HeritageAssociation.The consulting focuses on digitisation,standardisation, metadata, and education & ICT.Themain goal of the organisation is to provide access todistributed databases of cultural heritage organi-sations such as museums, archives, archaeologicalorganisations, monuments and special collectionsof libraries in a context-rich and XML-basedenvironment. Interoperability from both a technicaland an organisational perspective is therefore a majorissue.The Association offers access to heritageinformation to the general public athttp://www.cultuurwijzer.nl and customisedaccess for the educational field athttp://www.cultuurwijs.nl.E-mail: janneke.van.kersen@den.nl

Marco Meli, EDW International, ItalyMarco Meli is CEO and co-founder of EDWInternational (http://www.edw-international.com),Milan, Italy, a company providing leading corporatepublishing and content management applicationsbased on XML and related standards. Meli has longexperience in content/document management and inmultimedia creation and production. He is a memberof the Organisation Group of XML Italia VP ofSGML UG Italia. He has given a number of presen-tations at SGML and XML related conferences inItaly, Europe and the US. Meli is also editor of acolumn on new facets of publishing in Graphicusmagazine. He has been involved in cultural projectssince 1996, and acts as a reviewer of InformationSociety Technologies (IST) projects for the EuropeanCommission.E-mail: meli@edw.it

Paul Miller, UKOLN, UKDr Miller holds the post of Interoperability Focus atUKOLN (UK Office for Library and InformationNetworking, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/).Interoperability Focus is jointly funded by the JointInformation Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK'sFurther and Higher Education Funding Councils andResource: the Council for Museums Archives andLibraries.The post is responsible for exploring,publicising and mobilising the benefits and practiceof effective interoperability across diverse informationsectors, including libraries and the cultural heritageand archival communities. Dr Miller sits on a numberof relevant committees, including the ExecutiveCommittee of the CIMI Consortium, the AdvisoryBoard of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative(DCMI), and the Metadata Working Group ofthe UK Government's Office of the e­Envoy.E-mail: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk

Frank Nack, CWI, UKDr Frank Nack is a senior researcher at CWI,currently working within the Multimedia andHuman-Computer Interaction group. He obtainedhis PhD on `The Application of Video Semantics andTheme Representation for Automated Film Editing'at Lancaster University, UK.The main thrust of hisresearch is on video representation, digital videoproduction, multimedia systems that enhance humancommunication and creativity, interactive storytellingand media-networked oriented agent technology. Heis an active member of the MPEG-7 standardisationgroup where he served as editor of the Context andObjectives Document and the Requirements Docu-ment, and chaired the MPEG-7 DDL developmentgroup. He is on the editorial board of IEEEMultimedia, where he edits the Media Impactcolumn.E-mail: Frank.Nack@cwi.nl

Franco Niccolucci, Florence University, ItalyFranco Niccolucci has a background in mathematicsand computer science and is at present a professor atthe University of Florence, where he lectures in the